From Grease to Grace: Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Grace and Gratitude’ CD will fill you with both
Sometimes what you’re remembered for and what your legacy is are two different things. Such is the case with legendary singer-actress Olivia Newton-John.
The England-born, Australia-raised Newton-John will long be remembered for her sweet-and-sexy turn as Sandy in the movie adaptation of the nostalgic musical Grease. But her true legacy, if you look beneath the sparkly Hollywood veneer, is her profound spiritual journey – nowhere better encapsulated than in her soothing, soulful, contemplative CD Grace and Gratitude.
Though it rose to No. 2 on Billboard’s list of top New Age albums, you may have missed its 2006 launch – offered exclusively through Walgreens specifically to benefit cancer nonprofits, as she had been diagnosed with the disease in 1992 (ultimately succumbing to it 30 years later). It was re-released with revised and additional tracks in 2010 as Grace and Gratitude Renewed. There’s even a pink edition in honor of breast cancer awareness.
The CD features gentle, devotional vocal songs, often mystical odes to life and the Life-Giver, interspersed with flowing instrumental interludes – as if to provide time to meditate over it all. As one reviewer noted, the first track’s title, Pearls on a Chain, “is an apt description of an album that is tied together in a beauty too rarely found in today’s pop music.”
As the reviewer points out, all the songs’ titles “unveil the preoccupations of its maker,” including Learn to Love Yourself, Love is Letting Go of Fear, Instrument of Peace, Let Go Let God and The Power of Now.
Each track, in both word and music, is a salve for the suffering soul – whether aching from hurt or desire for the divine – coming from someone who knew more about pain than most of us, and perhaps deserved it the least.
“If I can say one thing about Olivia as a person and as an artist,” her Grace and Gratitude collaborator, Canadian singer-songwriter Amy Sky, told People magazine, “that was her philosophy, was to take life’s pain and to make it into something beautiful — illuminate the path for others.”
Revealing the meaning behind the song’s title, Newton-John once told an interviewer, “I believe that all human beings are connected, like pearls on a chain. … It is my hope that we can accept and respect each other’s [religious] traditions, no matter what our personal beliefs. This is my intention – to make music that helps to heal the heart and connect us to each other.”
This CD does that, as few others.
As People tells it, just days before Newton-John’s death at 73 in 2022, Sky was able to sing Grace and Gratitude’s title track chorus to her over the phone: “Thank you for life, thank you for everything. I stand here in grace and gratitude — and I thank you.”
Newton-John thought enough of that song to tell Sky she wanted the lyrics on her tombstone.
Grace and gratitude. That’s what you call a legacy.
